Atlassian Summit 2016

It's that time of the year: the temperature is dropping, leaves are changing their color. The Summer in Berlin is slowly fading away and that also means: time again for big announcements in the Atlassian Ecosystem, catching up with fellow Atlassian partners, getting first hand experience from Atlassians and of course making new friends. It's time for the Atlassian Summit 2016 in San Jose.

TEAM

This year it was all about teams and how to empower them to get their work done, in the best possible way by providing them the best tools. To no surprise Atlassian followed up on the Team Health Monitor they introduced last year with unveiling a complete Team Playbook that is available to the public right now.

The Team Playbook follows a simple pattern that works for all kinds of teams. After identifying your team type you assess the team's health and run plays to address weak spots and pain points. This process can be repeated as often as required to go from red to green. The Team Playbook contains comprehensive guides that walk you through the process. To assess and document your team's health, you can use the PDF templates that come with the Team Health Monitors. If you are already using Confluence, Atlassian also provides Blueprints to make it even simpler.

Data Center

Most of the other big news was centered around the various Atlassian Data Center offerings. JIRA, Confluence and Bitbucket Data Center will be joined by a HipChat Data Center beta that will start soon. The new features include AWS auto-scaling, SAML 2.0 Support, and Zero downtime upgrades. You can read a detailed writeup of Atlassian's Enterprise announcements here.

Home Sweet Home

Among Confluence and JIRA there are most likely many other tools you utilize for your day-to-day work. Keeping an eye on recent updates in all of the different tools can be cumbersome. During their Keynote: Innovation in Team Collaboration - Atlassian Summit 2016 Atlassian unveiled a sneak peak of a new cross-product home page that integrates seamlessly with other web based tools such as Dropbox or Google Docs. You can join the beta to experience of Atlassian Home yourself.

One more thing...

But there is more: Atlassian announced a fundamental change to their existing Expert Partner Program. We will tell you more that in a separate blog post. The new Solution Partner program will replace the existing Expert Program and will differentiate Atlassian partners in three different levels: Silver, Gold and Platinum.

Rumor had it already. We were excited nevertheless! With Europe being one of the most important regions for Atlassian, we will have our very own Summit in Barcelona in 2017. It will take place from May 2nd to May 4th, mark your calendars and meet us there.